My novel, Moonflower Murders, is actually two books in one. My heroine, an editor called Susan Ryeland, lives in the twenty-first century and is called upon to solve a crime whose perpetrator (the wrong man as it turns out) is still in jail. The clue that reveals the real killer is concealed in a book…
In the 1970s, as a teen in Mumbai I chafed against the restrictions my parents imposed: not allowed to travel alone, either walking or by public transport, nor visit new places with friends. Joining a college hiking trip, whether all girls or a mixed-gender group—was out of the question. In explanation, I was told, “Remember…
We all resent Julius Caesar for “accidentally” burning the Library at Alexandria, and we’re still pretty peeved at Robespierre and his compadres for burning millions of manuscripts, volumes, and scrolls during the French revolution. But in more recent decades manuscripts have been lost in a startling variety of ways from theft, to house fires, to…
When I was developing ideas for writing a Gilded Age Manhattan mystery series, I knew that I wanted to set in in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. My protagonist Lady Dunbridge would be one of the “new” women. I would blend history with the popular imagination of the era. An adventure story that…
It’s easy to panic when you realize that a five-foot rattlesnake is swimming a few feet away from you. My wife and I had agreed to let a good friend of ours take us on a hike through the wilds of eastern Oregon. The hike itself, we’d been assured as we loaded up the SUV…
Everyone loves twins. When parents of twins set out for their first walk with their new babies bundled up in a double stroller, they quickly learn just how popular twins are. Passers-by comment that they are “doubly blessed” and that twins will be “twice the fun.” Yet in fiction, a more sinister view of twins…
Many of my favorite novels are not easily classified and often fall under that nebulous term “Literary Fiction.” But I value my origins. As a teenager, I learned to love reading through the Horror genre, and I knew just where to go in the stacks to find Stephen King and Anne Rice. When I later…
Hosted by Christopher Golden and actor and bestselling author Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Once Upon A Halloween Night featured St. Martin’s Press and Tor Nightfire authors teaming up to write a horror short story in real-time. The end result was “HACK.” A special thank you goes out to all of the participating authors (in…
Crime has inspired so much music that multiple volumes could be devoted to the subject. Certainly the blues, country, punk, and hip-hop have all produced songs with crime at the center, but so have Cole Porter (“Miss Otis Regrets”), Berthold Brecht (The Threepenny Opera), folk singers, and big bands. There are whole categories of songs—“murder…
Why are so many crime authors writing historical novels today? It’s a great question with about a hundred answers. Some are writing about specific people or events in the past, both public or personal, that have piqued their curiosity. Others are writing about an era in which civilization and people were so different from today…
